Black Eyes
by IShouldBeOverThis
Summary: Quite dark and odd. An hommage to the very distinctive style of one of my favorite authors-tense changes are deliberate. Pretzels to anyone who knows who it is  and doesn't hate me for the sacrilege .  Mentions of drug use and abortion


When Sherlock was twenty-five his face became something else.

Prior to that he had looked young. He and his face did not match.

It was the drugs. People would say that. The family would say that, but he knows it's not true.

His face would have become older at twenty-five without the drugs. Perhaps not as quickly. Perhaps not overnight, but it would have happened. It had to happen. There was no other way for his face to come into alignment. He and his face agree now.

That night. The night in the café by the river. That night he still looked young.

After that it would change.

The other night, the one before. He was young then too.

He sees the man. It gives him a thrill that's hot like the feel of the drug as it sings its way along the vein of his arm. It's the feeling he chases so he follows the man out into the night.

It's the same café on another night, the night he still looked young. He comes there to see if he can find the man again. Like he comes back to the needle to see if he can feel it again.

She is with friends. There is little remarkable about her except her eyes. Her hair is white-blonde. But her eyes are black.

They are new friends. Friends she has made in London. She may have met them tonight. Her English is accentless, but the rhythm is wrong. Her verbs don't catch her nouns. Her lips are painted bright red.

He doesn't want her. He wants the man with the black eyes. The one who walked away. But when she comes to his table after her friends are gone he doesn't say no.

Leipzig, she tells him. She's from Leipzig. Not now. Not then, at the table in the café, but later in his room, when they sit on his sheets in the middle of the room hours later. They are naked and the wine is almost gone.

Leipzig, she says. I had to leave Leipzig in a hurry. There was someone. There was someone who wanted her and there was someone she wanted and they were not the same person. There was a child, or the possibility of a child. Now there isn't.

He had black hair and blue eyes, she says.

Yes, he says.

There was someone, he says. He had black hair and black eyes.

Yes, she says.

I lost his trail.

It happens, she says.

Not to me.

He knew I was there. He shouldn't have known I was there.

She says, did you want him to know you were there?

Perhaps, he says and his eyes go dark.

You have black hair and blue eyes, she says. Did he see you?

No. His eyes were like yours.

Your eyes are not like his, she says and he doesn't know who she means. The man he followed or the man she left in Leipzig.

She wanted him to touch her. That's what she said when she sat down at the table. She said she liked his eyes. She liked that they held no colour.

I want you to touch me, she says in the room when they have bought a bottle of wine and gone up his stairs.

They remove their clothes. She is very thin. There is a crescent scar just above the pale brown hair of her sex. He doesn't comment.

He knows he has track marks on his arm. He waits for her to comment but she doesn't.

She lies on the bed and stares at the mottled ceiling. She seems to be waiting, so he climbs on top of her.

They kiss. It is brief and awkward. Her lips are very cold as though she has been sucking on ice.

No? he says.

No, she says.

They get off the bed and spread the sheets on the floor.

He follows the man down that street, the street with the café. He does everything right. Stays in the shadows, keeps his footfalls nearly silent and as irregular as background noise, but the man knows. He _knows_.

Sherlock knows London like he knows the lines on his palm. Better. During his last stint in rehab he memorized the 'Knowledge.' He told the doctors he was planning to become a cabbie. But he turns a corner and the man is gone. He sinks to the ground clutching his knees.

Now, in his room he clutches his knees and drinks red wine with the young woman from Leipzig. It's very cold and their skin is pebbled with goose bumps. She is pale too and looks sallow and unwell. In the harsh light, her hair has a lemon tint. She has licked the stain from her lips and her mouth looks small. He realizes that she must be very young. That everything that has happened to her has happened while she was very young.

He feels he is too old to have had nothing happen to him at all.

Look, she says, it's dawn.

Later, at dusk, he will return to the café to look for the man with black eyes.


End file.
